


rise intact

by cordialcount



Category: Yuri!!! on Ice (Anime)
Genre: Developing Relationship, F/F, Post-Season/Series 01, Probably Safe for Diabetics
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-21
Updated: 2017-02-21
Packaged: 2018-09-25 23:13:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,605
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9851129
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cordialcount/pseuds/cordialcount
Summary: Mila wants to bite Sara's mouth down to the jawbone; she wants to lie down and leave this sport, in the embrace of which she can't look at a girl without superimposing her cracked and spilled over the sidewalk, forever.Mila jumps into victory, miscalculates, lands in an unfortunate place, and reconsiders who's left in the wake. All in a season's work.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [unheroics](https://archiveofourown.org/users/unheroics/gifts).



**I**

"What a waste," Sara says from the couch, "getting Mickey off my back about dates, when I don't actually have anyone to date."

Mila's mouth has been in this conversation, she's sure, but not her attention since Georgi ("My god." "Yeah?" "The god of misery.") was last mentioned half an hour ago. Post-GPF rest day still means stretches if she doesn't want a combo break on level 4 spiral designations. She hasn't removed her toe sleeves, and when she bows her weight forward, they crook against the hotel's lead-grey tiles, uneasily organic-seeming, like a giant's shed skin. 

"I'll date you," Mila says. 

Her lunge has passed the point of good pain. She looks up. Sara's fingers are cupped around her mouth. Her hair forms a wider parentheses around them: the exaggerated Os of her surprise almost comic. 

"I never realized you were—possible," Sara says, the last word high and conspicuously quiet, although this may be because indoor voice is alien to all of Mila's rinkmates. Then Sara plants her feet on the floor, flutters her eyes closed, reaches for Mila's waist. There's nothing for it. They—hug, Mila supposes, is the word, although it is a little damp and she feels more like a bedroll squeezed for packing than a partner in a gesture of affection. 

You've never seen her be intentionally cruel, Mila thinks, now that she can't reconstrue what she's said. Tension trembles Sara's hand on her hip. Mila is possible, then. Sara is beaming.

An evening of mutually assured drunkenness later, Mila worries at a molar with her tongue. Over a few glasses of frothy radioactive-blue somethings the bar's music has ramped from headnodic to head-spinning. She has a few Bubbly Mila classics to deliver, but moisture is disappearing from her mouth as if leaked; Sara smears across her vision, long exposure. _Trust your body_ is amateur advice. By her level everything that matters allows such a narrow and unintuitive margin of success that she never stops observing, recording, dissecting.

Sara Crispino: Europe's ice PrinCeSs, having the sort of genetically arresting lines that guarantee high marks in half the components and carry the other half by the corridor effect. Sara Crispino has never finished more than ten points behind Mila. Sara Crispino has just broken up with her brother. Sara Crispino is known for flubbing jumps because she forgets that emotion does not overcome physics. Sara Crispino has maintained hand to hair/skin contact with Mila Babicheva for the last hour straight.

Mila has the most lopsided score split of the senior ladies' field. She will do anything to win Worlds. Laid out like that, it's practically strategic to insert five octopus emoji after her name in Sara's phone and walk her back to her hotel. 

They pause once, halfway through an idle fuck/marry/kill roll of the American men. No consensus has been reached. Sara doesn't look like she could kill anyone, anyway: glossy, devil-horned only by the distant spires of a factory building and cast in a liquid flush by the lamplight, so wide-eyed with vulnerability when she looks at Mila that her sclerae show all around her irises. Mila wants to bite Sara's mouth down to the jawbone; she wants to lie down and leave this sport, in the embrace of which she can't look at a girl without superimposing her cracked and spilled over the sidewalk, forever. She can't handle the chemicals colliding in her blood. 

She presses her forearm against Sara's ribs, shoves her mock-protesting along the Poblenou waterfront.

 

 **II**

The Sunday after she wins Nationals Mila wakes with her usual array of bruises, but for once she doesn't have any open cuts. "Yura," she calls down their shared hallway, "I'm going to the pool! Come with me?" 

She sounds chipper. Yuri definitely won't go. "Useless hag," Yuri yells back. "Let me drill my toenail in peace."

Swimming is comforting. It feels good pushing through something she can see, letting herself have full-body contact with her environment; even the light is almost palpable where it plunges through her lane. She doesn't have to endure stroke efficiency workshops or pay for water time. She can be at least as good at this at twenty-five, or fifty, as she is now. 

And—in the public pool the children are careless and ordinary. No one has skating's sportwide fetish for stoicism in pain; one kid scrapes her ankle across a lane line and actually howls. Mila appreciates the contrast with the rink's younger girls, each batch of which seems to hit the triples milestone earlier and invent yet another grotesquely weird spiral position for the ISU's creativity points. At this rate Russia's prodigy testing will go postnatal. Only the age requirements keep it in check. 

Mila is at 50% clean on her quad salchow in practice, a little better than her triple axel, after sacrificing social life and liberty in pursuit of a hip injury. Some current infant may render her a historical footnote before it loses its braces regardless. Land quads on the back of a combination, even. Half the time Mila's body is but an example to her successors of what to avoid.

She lets herself brood until she has jogged back to her dorm. Key in the door, click, she stops. Only Viktor has watched her think like that, and only back when he was regularly having it worse. Katsuki Yuuri ended that kinship. 

It's not like the smile she puts up is false. It's just generated by a different train of thought: the part of her that knows that by twenty-five she will no longer be a competitive skater, a target for teenybopper sponsorship offers or the schadenfreude of the North American continent. That has watched Sara, so much closer to expiration, tell reporters she was _excited_ for a new life. Lilia even nodded somehow before Mila changed the channel. The smile is about—what Sara is clearly better than Mila at, and yet Mila doesn't have to be envious of.

"Hey," Mila says, as soon as her call connects.

As her rink's only international hope, Sara can book an extravagant amount of ice time. Mila often watches Sara do figures on these calls, a tawny effigy in the weak light. Today she's at home, cross-legged in post-stretch radiance and plum eyeliner, betrayed from a socialite-on-ski-vacation image only by the ubiquitous rolls of duct tape. "Hey you," Sara says. She waves a tube of concealer at her backing window; the Belluno countryside depixelates behind her as if on command. "Do you think this is the right shade?"

"Was it Michele?"

"Ugh, that's not funny," Sara says, but her lips quirk. "I'm glad you called. I've been exchanging emails with Yakov. He's doing a summer intensive—"

Mila remembers it. Six weeks of grinding, spine-breaking (literally, for one boy) work that builds resilience and camaraderie in the way of a POW camp. She glances out over the Neva, picks at a fingernail. Is it more selfish to want Sara to refuse because Mila will keep her advantage from it—knowing, intimately, her absolute tolerance for pain—or to want Sara to come, because Sara will crush herself from the pressure? "You want to do that?"

"You could be more enthusiastic, Mila," Sara says, but whatever flicked across Mila's face must have made its mark. They go on to Sara's disastrous free skate at her own nationals, and don't mention Yakov again for months.

 

**III**

With a week to go before Europeans, Mila sneaks into Yubileyny while it's still black out. Lilia says her program lacks resonance, so Mila is relying on the predawn quiet to practice alone. Un-flap her limbs, hunt down the sincerity that gives a silly face a legible sense of betrayal. 

Instead she catches Yuri Skyping in a closet. He has wedged himself into a pile of hockey helmets; the faceguards have left ruddy lattices across his arms. His face colors similarly when he realizes his screen—showing someone's rather impressive ass—has been angled toward the door.

Mila likes Yuri. She especially likes him off-center, because he'd never let himself be perceived that way on the ice, so she allows him a silent minute to scrabble in his indignity. "What the fuck," he says, when his shirt is on. His phone drips grains of glass.

"... are you doing here? Would Yakov have done? Is the best response to those legs—"

"What's your fucking problem. I bet you wouldn't last until we fly out without calling _your_ —" Sudden cut. Red blotches over the shells of his ears. As with his programs, Mila thinks, Yuri should really learn to end his sentences with confidence. "International friend."

She plucks a dust mote from his braid. "You keep score, Yuratchka."

She calls Sara that night, obviously. The joy of age, all three years she has on Yuri: the maturity to ignore stupid bets. She will, however, enjoy the steady decay of his composure over the week.

 

 **IV**

Everyone knows Mila's won by 3:30 in. The commentators aren't even pretending Sara and the French waif won't jockey for silver at best. Mila, who in the grand tradition of concussing Yakov decided on both her 4S-2T and 3A right before her music came on, trips off the ice without collecting a single rose. Untapes her calves and dabs blood off her bunions, downs her bottle of water. Autopilot props her up through the kiss and cry, and leads her to the knot of mostly-Russians sheltering from their coaches.

"—party afterward," Christophe is saying. No one can trust a grin that toothy. Viktor, ten thousand kilometers from his personal grin extractor, turns on Yuri with the gentle smile of someone who has stumbled across a tasty creature and does not wish to scare it off.

Yuri scowls. "Invite Mila and Sara," he says. "If I have to watch any of you make kissy faces any longer I'm reporting you for premeditated sabotage."

Something in Mila's throat goes _unghff_. She's not used to thinking of Mila-and-Sara as a unit for kissing. An excerpt from the short list of elite skaters not widely considered total headcases, perhaps, or the ladies who love the lutz and avoid the flip.

"Invite yourself," she says. "I can hear your frustration through the wall. Honestly, if he's holding out at this point you should report _him_ for sabotage."

She can feel a brewing punch. With long experience she dodges by slumping further down the boards, then spurs herself off her knees and hauls herself back around to the prep corral where Sara is waiting. 

"Mila, you were amazing!" Sara exclaims, grabbing her hands and shaking them like pompoms. She sounds so uncomplicatedly happy Mila is nauseous with shame hearing it. "The second clean quad in ladies' history! I'm coming for you, Mila, I'm going to try for the third—"

Mila shakes her head. "Masson's almost done," she says. "Your skates aren't even on."

If she doesn't analyze her impulse—it's not as if she has much bandwidth for it, her body instinctively winding down until the gala. It's easy. Mila picks up Sara's skates, and when Sara doesn't appear to be helping herself, pulls off her sneakers and jams a boot onto her foot. Sara has always had a bad case of lace bite; Mila can almost see the pain spiking up under the tongue. The abrupt redirection of Sara's focus as Mila ties up each lace, lets the residual restlessness in her fingers carry them up Sara's thighs.

"Don't try any stupid jumps now," Mila says. "I'll show you where you're misplacing your hips later. We'll get a harness."

"Italy's Sara Crispino," the announcer calls. Mila looks at her hand on Sara's hip, at Sara's hand over hers. Lightly her lips connect with Sara's knuckles, and let the chill draw through. "Good luck," Mila says, head still bowed. She means it: what little she can give.

 

**V**

It's not even ice that does her in. Late March, already flown into Boston: "Take a day off," Yakov orders when Mila says her knee's wobbling on her spin entries. He's let Viktor book an entire rink to... practice being Viktor Nikiforov, for all Mila knows, so she goes to the latest iteration of the studio Lilia manages to find in every city. She tightens and loosens her muscles at the barre, takes a few runs at off-ice jumps.

Her leg pops out from under her. Fuck, Mila thinks, trying to decide whether to call Yakov or just hobble over to the baby danseurs in the next room. Then the pain lands and that's it, torn ACL, she won't be skating until well after Worlds.

"If you get up, you get past me," Lilia says when Mila tries to attend the short programs.

Once you tune out the screaming, Yakov is a pushover, but she's seen Lilia demonstrate nasty joint locks—arm; leg; spine; once, on Yuri, hair—for someone Mila wouldn't dare fight back. Mila shifts in her bed. "Is there a reward for good behavior?"

Lilia's hand tightens on the knee that currently appears twice the size of the other. "Yura can carry you out to the free skate."

Always farther to fall, Mila supposes. 

The hospital's wifi won't even load a portal. She plunges into the videos Sara saved for her on a flash drive shaped like a tentacle. Lovely artistic programs, interspersed with hideous falls in every sport Mila has ever heard of. Mila hadn't quite suspected Sara of this sense of humor; she can't help a simmer of fondness.

Someone has even made a video of Mila in a perfect Rippon quad lutz. Mila's not proud to be envious of the uncanny child of an Autodesk nerd and a jump simulator, but it's very good: nothing to disbelieve in the restrained height of the leap, the shifting shadow, the ice spray of so much bodyweight shedding its torque. Only what Mila knows, what anyone who stops cooing over the Olympics for long enough to throw themselves against space knows: no human can min/max like this, with this provably insane certainty.

That's a program. What makes skating a performance is the chance of catastrophe; height is nothing without the ground against which it is achieved.

Sara appears right when she's about to fall asleep. Mila is tired, and when Sara is shining so, Mila doesn't want an apology. "You deserve it," Mila says, without asking her score, without letting herself be blind. In the shimmering dusk Sara's duffel and handbag straps disjoint her arms from her torso; nearer, mouth to mouth, the pieces knit together like a reversing illusion. One beautiful and inescapably human being, which is all Mila can want, and all she can aspire to be.

Sara says, "I only hope."

 

**-**

(It's difficult to know, without having had the opportunity, whether one will be resentful. Sara's dress sails over her waist as she bends down and down, nose to her skate, and then not three meters later hurls herself into her signature jump; but it's Mila whose blood goes to her head. For a moment she cannot resent anything. She is standing and she is full with terror, and like helium it makes her weightless. 

Yuri nudges—shoves, really—her back into her seat. "You're tearing up," he says in horror.

"Have you ever had a _moment_ ," she says, to which he just cuffs her over the shoulder. Sara probably threatened to give him a limp too if he furthers Mila's. "It wasn't even yours!" he says.

"You'll learn better," Mila says, and turns back to the ice.)


End file.
